In physical realms the singularity is an event that due to its nature is assumed to only happened once[1] and that has no natural explanation. Most frequently the term is used in connection with the origin of the universe (so called cosmic or big bang singularity) or less frequently with the origin of life (biological singularity) and its field is in general subject of study by origin science. When scientific principles were first being developed into the scientific method, scientists like Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton[note 1], and William Kelvin distinguished between primary and secondary (natural) causes.[note 2] A primary cause was meant to be a first cause to explain singularities.[4]Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica argued that when it comes to causes, it is not possible to go to infinity (either there is a first cause or there is no cause at all)[note 3] and he referred to the first cause as the ultimate cause.[note 4] He identified it with God, because at least in one respect, a first cause exhibits an important property of the divine: It is uncaused. According to David Berlinski this is a weak (Aquinas's conclusion might not be definitively confirmed as true or false)[note 5] but not absurd argument that is frequently met with inept objections.[5] Berlinski also argues that the concept of singularity belongs essentially to mathematics and singularities are not experimentally accessible objects that could be weighted, measured, assessed, replicated, balanced, or seen by any modality of the senses.[7]

On the other hand, when contemporary physicists refer to a singularity, they are generally referring to a space-time event, situation or point in which one or more physical quantities (like temperature or density) approach infinite value[8] as another parameter goes to zero (typically radius of the universe).[9] There is however a problem how to interpret such terms as an infinite temperature, infinite mass, infinite energy or infinite force in the realms of physics. That's why naturalistic physicists who reduce their explanations of physical reality to secondary (natural) causes assume that there is some new set of physical laws[10] or some new way of looking at the problem needed to make the apparent singularity go away.[11] According to C.J.S. Clarke, no final satisfactory statement emerges of what a singularity really is like.[12]

The big bang singularity

The big bang singularity or the cosmic singularity refers to a conjectured hypothetical state at the beginning of the universe in which material particles were at no distance from one another and the temperature, density, and curvature of the universe were infinite. The inference to this state is based on the evidence that the universe is expanding and thus it has established a clear path into the past. If expanding things (the large scale structure of the universe) are now far apart, they must at one point have been close together. At the singularity itself, a great many physical parameters zoom to infinity. This posts however a great problem for attempts for naturalistic explanations of the beginning of the universe since as the astronomer Joseph Silk observed, an indefinitely dense universe is where the laws of physics, and even space and time, break down.[5] He further asserts that a state of infinite density is completely unacceptable as a physical description of the universe.[7] According to Alan Guth, "In spite of the fact that we call it the Big Bang theory it really says absolutely nothing about the Big Bang. It doesn't tell us what banged, why it banged, what caused it to bang. It doesn't even describe, doesn't really allow us to predict what the conditions are immediately after this bang." [note 6] Michio Kaku from City University of New York adds that "at the instant of the Big Bang ... we have the centrepiece of the Universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical law".[14]

Many naturalistic scientists are trying to escape the inescapable fact that the universe really did begin by proposing speculative theories including imaginary time (cf. Stephen Hawking:"Only if we could picture the universe in terms of imaginary time would there be no singularities...When we go back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still be singularities")[15], string theory, prior universe beyond the reach of observation[16] (cf. Victor J. Stenger: "In the scenario I presented, our universe is described as having "tunneled" through the chaos ...from prior universe that existed for all previous time")[8], or put their hope to quantum mechanics[11][17]. Some resort to the assertion that the world was uncaused (cf. Carl Sagan: "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be")[4] while other dismiss the question of the first cause altogether (cf. Hawking: "To ask what happened before the universe began is like asking for a point on the Earth at 91 degrees north latitude. Instead of talking about the universe being created, and maybe coming to and end, one should just say: the universe is.")[7].

The hot big bang singularity

The big bang singularity is sometimes named the hot big bang singularity to emphasize the fact [8] that while going back in the time towards the origin of the universe, all matter and energy in the universe gets squeezed together into a "pinhead" - a process that would make it "very, very, very hot".[8][13] Hot Big Bang singularity appears to be in violation of the first law of thermodynamics since the global energy needed to run universe has come from nowhere and the principles of nineteenth-century physics require that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Thus, the hot Big Bang singularity remains beyond any causal scheme and the creation of the universe is still unexplained by any force, field, power, potency, influence or instrumentality known to physics or humankind.[7] The [hot] big bang singularity does not represent a physical concept, because it cannot be accommodated by a physical theory. It is a point at which physical theories give the way.[5]

Antipathy to the idea of beginning

J.C. Lennox points out that the supporters of various schools of materialism violate the scientific Socratic principle by letting their worldview to play a role in their antipathy to the idea of beginning. Among them are Engels (cf. "Did the God created the world, or has the world been in existence eternally?"), Stephen Hawking (cf."the idea that the time has beginning...smacks of divine intervention") and Sir John Maddox, a former editor of Nature (cf. "ultimite origin of our world [gave creationists] ample justification [for their beliefs]").[1]

The naked singularity

The naked singularity is referred to as "a troublesome sibling" of the black hole, which is then considered one of the strangest ideas the modern science ever introduced. Both terms pertain to a conjectured fate of a massive star that reached the end of its life. Naturalistic scientists believe a large star eventually collapses to a black hole or suggest it might instead become a so-called naked singularity. Sorting out what actually happens[18] is declared to be one of the most important unresolved problems in astrophysics. The speculations about undiscovered naked singularities are part of the quest for an unified theory of physics and they do not provide any direct observational tests of such a theory.[19] Berlinski writes with irony that until recently, great physicists have attempted with dignity to respect the distinction between what is known and what is not. He continues that contemporary cosmologists compromised their scrupulousness and feel free to say anything that pops into their heads, uncorrected by any criticism beyond the trivial.[7][note 7]

Einstein on singularity

Some scientists argue that when Einstein's General theory of relativity is extrapolated back to the beginning [of the universe] it is discovered the equations blow up in the region of singularity or a cosmic singularity, respectively.[14] Einstein himself however expressed his following views on this matter: "One may not therefore assume the validity of the [field] equation for very high density of the field and of the matter and one may not conclude that the beginning of the expansion must mean a singularity in the mathematical sense. All we have to realize is that the equations may not be continued over such regions."[7]John Hartnett also points out that there is no known mechanism to start the universe expanding out of singularity - the equations in the theory only work after the expansion has begun.[17]

Bible and origins

Scientists who are biblical Christians believe that a creation model of the biblical kind clearly predicted a beginning of the world, [1] and thus this can be considered as successful testable prediction giving the credit to predictive power of Biblical message.[note 8] They warn against the danger of being seduced by speculation masquerading as science and they consider cosmic singularity to be compatible with creation of space, time, matter and energy ex nihilo (i.e. out of nothing) and often cite Arno Penzias, astrophysicist and Nobel laureate who stated in 1978 for The New York Times that "The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang)[note 9] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."[8] The New Atheists object to God as a final explanation for ultimate cause, yet they themselves have no explanation for the existence of the mass/energy of which the universe is formed and thus must regard it essentially as a brute fact. Due to the law of causality, explanation in science, if it is to avoid infinite regress, always leads to certain things that are regarded as ultimate.[1] American astronomer, physicist and cosmologist Robert Jastrow closes his book God and the Astronomers with these words: "At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."[30]

Notes

↑cf."This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being....This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God "pantokrator," or Universal Ruler...Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where....God is the same God, always and every where. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance.…It is allowed by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always and every where....And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearance of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy." Newton, I.: General Scholium. Translated by Motte, A. 1825. Newton's Principia: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy[2]

↑Adherents of methodological naturalism such as E.J.Larson often mistakenly portray these scientists from their position as "freely mix[ing] matters of supernatural and natural causation" without recognizing the real difference they made between primary and secondary (natural) causes.[3]

↑cf."Seeing an endless row of dominoes toppling before our eyes, would we without pause say that no first domino set the other dominoes to toppling? Really?" in Berlinski: Devil's Delusion, p.67[5]

↑cf.Max Planck: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."[6]

↑cf."The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." The Book of Job: An introduction (G.K. Chesterton, 1907)

↑Scientific organizations dominated by atheistic scientists who usurp the right to call themselves "mainstream" routinely describe this 'bang' as following: "A huge explosion, known as the Big Bang, then sent matter and energy expanding in all directions."[13]

↑cf."When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything."[20] (paraphrased G.K. Chesterton) or more precisely attributed: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." (G.K. Chesterton) "The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything" (É.L. Cammaerts)[21]

↑In the more exact sense the Biblical message in this context is regarded to be a sort of testimony about things that are believed to had happened in the unobservable past. The predictive power of this message relates to actual discovery of scientific evidence inferring this testimony (claiming the World had the beginning) to be correct.

↑To avoid confusion, an explanatory note should be made that the ‘big bang’ in this context obviously connotes the concept of the rapid expansion of the universe formulated to interpret the evidence (such as the Hubble’s law[24], or later the accelerating universe[25]) for universal expansion. According to W. Gitt et al. the Bible states twelve times an expansion of that kind had happened when God stretched out the heavens'.[26] While the concept of expansion itself is not a problem, the notion of Big Bang as the secular materialistic hypothesis of how the purely material universe came into existence is according to creationist community or biblical literalists, respectively, worth of challenging. For scientific objections to Big Bang theory cf.the cosmology statement[27], the objections of YEC community might be reviewed, in paper ‘Christian apologists should abandon the big bang’[28] or in 'An interview with creationist physicist/cosmologist John Hartnett'.[29]

References

↑ 1.01.11.21.3John C. Lennox (2009). God's undertaker. Has science buried God?. Oxford, England: Lion Hudson, 67-69, 186, 204. ISBN 978-0-7459-5371-7. “Apart from the obvious fact that no one observed [the origin of the universe], scientists think of the Big Bang as a singularity in the past, an unrepeatable event;...”

↑Jozef Piaček, Miloš Kravčík (1999). FILIT (Open Philosophical Encyclopaedia): Singularity(Slovak). Comenius University in Bratislava, with support of Open Society Foundation (Nadácia otvorenej spoločnosti). “In astronomy the singularity refers to a space-time event at point of which the known physical laws cease to be valid and at which the gravitational field equations become meaningless since some of their elements acquire extreme values. From perspective of general theory of relativity singularities involve all black holes and the starting point of the expansion of the universe (Big Bang) when radius of the universe is equal to zero and density is reaching infinitely high value.”

↑ALAN GUTH, Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics. MIT department of physics. “Recently Guth has worked with Alex Vilenkin (Tufts) and Arvind Borde (Southampton College) to show that the inflating region of spacetime must have a past boundary, and that some new physics, perhaps a quantum theory of creation, would be needed to understand it.”

↑ 11.011.1What is singularity and why do all laws of physics break down at singularity?. PhysLink.com. “You can imagine the problems though -- how do we interpret an infinite mass or infinite energy or infinite force? Usually we assume that there is some new set of laws or some new way of looking at the problem that makes the apparent singularity go away. ...Most people worry about singularities involving general relativity: two examples being a black hole and the singularity that classical general relativity predicts was our universe at the moment it began. If you try to apply the laws of general relativity in these situations you will inevitably find the same 1/x singularities I've been talking about. How are we going to resolve these singularities? We expect quantum mechanics to do the job, since it is the theory that correctly describes physics at small distance scales. Unfortunately, while we have good theories of atomic physics, we don't real have a good theory of quantum gravity. Many of us think string theory will ultimately provide the resolution to these problems.
In short then, a singularity represents an infinity and we generally don't think nature is infinite. The problem arises from not having some kind of 'floor' built into a theory that keeps you from taking the limit of 1/x as x goes to zero. The way out is to apply a new theory that has such a floor, such as quantum mechanics or string theory (quantum gravity).”}

↑C.J.S. Clarke (1993). The Analysis of Space-Time Singularities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 175. ISBN 0-521-43796-2. “It is perhaps one of the disappointments of the subject of time-space singularities, as it was established by the definitive work of Hawking and Penrose in the early 1970s, that no final satisfactory statement emerges of what a singularity really is like.”

↑ 13.013.1National Academy of Sciences(NAS) (1999). Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences 48. The Nationals Academies Press. “Hubble's hypothesis of an expanding universe leads to certain deductions. One is that the universe was more condensed at a previous time. From this deduction came the suggestion that all the currently observed matter and energy in the universe were initially condensed in a very small and infinitely hot mass.”

↑ 14.014.1Parallel Universes. BBC (14 February 2002). “NARRATOR: If everything in the Universe was to be explained then String Theory and the Big Bang would now seamlessly merge and they'd complement each other perfectly. After all, one concerned the birth of the Universe and the other all the matter in it. It was surely a foregone conclusion. Physics seemed to be on the edge of glory, but it all went terribly wrong. Try as they might they just couldn't get the two ideas to merge and then, after 10 years of struggling, something even worse happened: their two pet theories now began to self-destruct. The first problem appeared with the Big Bang. The cosmologists had assumed that as they worked backwards in time they would eventually work their way back all the way to the beginning of the Big Bang. There would be no awkward gaps, but after years of end-less refinement there was one gap which refused to disappear, the most important one of all.
ALAN GUTH: In spite of the fact that we call it the Big Bang Theory it really says absolutely nothing about the Big Bang. It doesn't tell us what banged, why it banged, what caused it to bang. It doesn't even describe, doesn't really allow us to predict what the conditions are immediately after this bang.
MICHIO KAKU: The fundamental problem of cosmology is that the laws of physics as we know them break down at the instant of the Big Bang. Well some people say what's wrong with that, what's wrong with having the laws of physics collapse? Well for a physicist this is a disaster. All our lives we've dedicated to the proposition that the Universe obeys knowable laws, laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics and here we have the centrepiece of the Universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical law.
NARRATOR: The very beginning of the Big Bang was the single biggest mystery in all of cosmology. It was called the singularity.
PAUL STEINHARDT: When you extrapolate Einstein's general Theory of Relativity back to the beginning you discover what we call a singularity, a cosmic singularity, which is to say that the equations blow up.”

↑Is the Universe finite or infinite? An interview with Joseph Silk. ESA, European Space Agency (2 May 2001). “ESA: We seem to agree that the Big Bang started with an 'inflation', a short period of high-speed expansion. But what happened before that?
Joseph Silk: Maybe long before inflation there was a Universe that was collapsing near a singularity, which then inflated again, so there was already a history before the Big Bang. Some people think there was a 'pre-Big Bang'. One possibility is that this pre-Big Bang, if there was such a place, would have made lots of entropy (the amount of disorder in the Universe). And the Universe we live in does have huge amounts of entropy. That's one theory. But we have no understanding of how to change from collapsing to expanding. There's no physical way to explain that transition. Some people believe that they have explanations the pre-Big Bang, so it's a respectable theory.”

↑ 17.017.1Alex Williams, John Hartnett (2005). Dismantling the Big Bang. Green Forest, AR, USA: Master Books, 346. ISBN 978-0-89051-437-5. “It is simply assumed that space was expanding right from the beginning and the substance of the universe "went along for the ride", and was thereby carried out of the singular state. No one can explain how, so they place their hope for an explanation in quantum gravity...At this stage it is still in the realm of speculation. ... Big-bang theory is based on the laws of physics but those laws cannot explain the important components of the model. The big-bang universe begins in a singularity (all matter, energy, space and time crushed into a point of infinite density) and there is no known mechanism to start the universe expanding out of the singularity - the equations in the theory only work after the expansion has begun.”

↑Nature of the Universe. The University of Hong Kong, Department of Physics; Hong Kong Space Museum. “We call the center of a black hole a singularity. Naively, it has zero radius and infinite density. However, a more accurate statement is that we do not know the physical laws that govern the singularity and we have no idea what happens there.”

↑Pankaj S. Joshi (January 21, 2009). Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics?. Scientific American Magazine (February 2009). “A black hole has two parts. At its core is a singularity, the infinitesimal point into which all the matter of the star gets crushed. Surrounding the singularity is the region of space from which escape is impossible, the perimeter of which is called the event horizon. Once something enters the event horizon, it loses all hope of exiting. Whatever light the falling body gives off is trapped, too, so an outside observer never sees it again. It ultimately crashes into the singularity. Conventional wisdom has it that a large star eventually collapses to a black hole, but some theoretical models suggest it might instead become a so-called naked singularity. Sorting out what happens is one of the most important unresolved problems in astrophysics.The discovery of naked singularities would transform the search for a unified theory of physics, not least by providing direct observational tests of such a theory.”

↑Ayala, F. and Dobzhansky, T. (1974). Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems. University of California Press, Berkeley, 390. ISBN 0-520-02649-7. “What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated; that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But … the machinery by which the cell (at least the non-primitive cell, which is the only we know) translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA. Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code. Thus we may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of physics) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a residue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics.(quoted Popper, K.R., 1974. Scientific Reduction and the Essential Incompleteness of All Science)”

↑Werner Gitt, Bob Compton, Jorge Fernandez (2011). Without Excuse. Creation Book Publishers, 198. ISBN 978-1-921643-41-5. “The commonly accepted beginning to the universe is a modern theory referred to as the Big Bang. …The Big Bang was formulated to account for evidence of universal expansion (which the Bible states (twelve times) happened when God says He stretched out the heavens). While the concept of an expansion is not a problem, the idea that everything started with this ‘singularity’ which unaccountably brought the entire universe into existence, is worth challenging. …The Big Bang is the secular Materialist’s hypothesis of how the (purely material) universe came into existence.”